a train passes through town each morning and afternoon I listen as it tells me the story of the rail’s immobility. how can this not be a fact: I am the train tracks down there deluding myself with thoughts of my own motion, the trains run over my body, while I’m belly down, a gust of wind, a stream of a breath that swells with the rhythm of the earth. I read each invisible mark, what the train left behind after it rolled across my skin. poetry, traces etched into the tracks, imprinted and worn smooth by the sun, wind and misfortunes, traces aching for a place without people, floating traces, that self-destruct and disappear before any reader arrives.

now the town’s afternoon is waning, the sun’s blood draining, a round red letter o grows paler and paler in the void, its mouth gaping. I shudder violently twice a day and now, I drearily count the vibrations gradually fading away into my body until I am lured to sleep.

on the other side of the river, black mountains, and I know I am darker than the night shadow. flies drop according to my hair, I want to vomit from the hideous blackness the clotting the legs stumbling through all things in the human world.

the nights come and leave me, they loved me, they licked leisurely, every deformed moment, they were silent and I breathed slowly, I was face down on that face, the banks of that back, that river stream, that heaven, I softened the shape, I erased the past’s question marks, I smoothed myself by forgetting, I trimmed the shadows of dreams

I like this dried up stream, this desolate sky, this abandoned place, I like to go carefully down the dehydrated stream collecting the corpses of flowers, dreams lying down ready and bare, cold and pale, I like these words without meaning, this flesh without feeling, I like the disappearance of familiar childhood faces these, I like those defeated dreamers on their backs, I like this exhaustion this ending, this destruction, these thirsty poems, this strange love every night

memory: an old gate full of shadow and rusted green the absent presence of my childhood

(in my body, countryside villages of foggy dreams, a stirring of roadside grass, the lonely towns that console, the wings of hopeless streets that flutter, deserted laughter, wide open hysterical crying in the night rain, through the sky’s clouds of five colors I wander alphabetizing letters that disappear and reappear each second, the rainbow blurs, the insane anger of my father, the cat dead in a straw fire, the scream its ashes made streaking across the sky, the child can never be gentle again, dreams will always betray)

love: I know you are leaving me you whom I love come here come back here any time bring with you the hearts of imaginary strangers

(a dead rose before my eyes and its soul has recently returned from a weird lover, the vast smell of the wild rose hides inside a tightly packed bra, the pliers squeeze, the faces the faces of strangers fade away and I can’t find my own in there, I know you leaving me in a dark cave where there remains only a fish on the wall from our ancestors)

book of sleep: in the most silent of nights the pain does not stop creating its noise a weird song the wonderful singing of a mermaid

ah finally a page of the book tells me this truth: my face is never in the presence of a face, the only thing in front of us is to live or to die

kill me, no need for any reason! death without reason, inside something forgotten, inside a painful sadness, inside a memory, it has not yet gone away the smell of the corpse decomposing until it is diluted into the void

apparently, I see clearly down the long path from his eyes to mine, the kisses float around in empty space, but never arrive.

I once sent to him to keep for me my wild dreams, and now without hope I stay painstakingly picking mud from the strange shape of his chest, to comfort my crimes, and he so lightly carrying his body wandering around the world of earth.

we will find every way to go back to the beginning and discover our origin, the promise to the future is sliding from your tongue rising and falling as waves and I will never have a reason to return.

I will regularly stop over for a visit and talk to the dead, the promise to the past is sliding from your tongue rising and falling as waves and I will never have a reason to return.

we will be a pair of faces looking at each other staggering in the vast night air, the promise to the present is sliding from your tongue rising and falling as waves and I will never have a reason to return.

future, past, present – big words with little use, I don’t like to stand under their shadow, I don’t want to think of them anymore except to obsess over their destruction, I know the things that have not returned but I don’t know the things that will come.

here I have gotten used to the graves around me, I am tranquil, they teach the children to love the knowable, no one meets the ghosts anymore, even in their mother’s stories

each step of ours only brings us to this void, entering the grave, the velvet light of the mist and fragrance of the body will make the feeling of pain disappear, please believe me, now no one is crying out as stranger to their loneliness.

the deeply grey story of a Sunday: a giant cow appears at the end of a bridge, its shadow covers the surface of water in a bright yellow, the market is a mess of broken tiles. we children listen to the echoes of the cow’s violent bellow: I am a ruminating animal, I chew myself, I eat myself, I nibble away at myself, I toss out my leftovers, I have something of myself, I wear myself down, I pat my belly, I drink my urine, I let myself out, I cover myself in shadow. crying and laughing we chase the giant cow, the flamboyant leaves flying and a gust of green in the eyes, gasp, I stamp my feet on its shadow, my feet get filthy.

I stop running, look at my feet, voices dilute the blood, drops of rain dilute the brilliant red of my hand, drawn blood leaves a body dry, and the tide rises to flood the color of the moon.

we come to the end of the bridge, the giant cow disappears, a procession of bright yellow clouds float on the surface of deeply grey water.

an old artist effaces his painting, endless mumbles: I am a ruminating animal, I chew myself, I eat myself, I nibble away at myself, I toss out my leftovers, I have something of myself, I wear myself down…